Cyberpunk 2077

i'm probably never going to play this game, at least not for the next 10 years, but i've been dropping in twitch streams and there's something about it that i just find deeply unsettling. not in an intentional way, the game world just sort of repulses me and makes me want to stop watching. i think it's maybe two things:

1. i think i just don't like full environment raytracing. it might be getting to a point where the entire game world is entering the uncanny valley. and it all looks very wet. the last generation of graphical achievement resulted in characters that always looked sweaty, now we get whole environments that always look sweaty.
2. based entirely on randomly jumping into different streams, every square inch of the game world seems to follow a really strict design sense that makes it cyberpunky. it's extremely cyberpunky. there's no variance at all. there's something suffocating about the prospect of exploring a massive game world where every location seems interchangeable. the general raytracey sweatiness might make that worse though. the thing about movies like blade runner is you only spend 2 hours with them, you only see the dozen or so locations the filmmaker wants you to see allowing you to extrapolate the rest of the world. actually wandering around the extrapolated parts seems tiresome

There's also the part of the game that looks like Mad Max.

yeah i've found the environment to be very samey for all the work they apparently put into it and yes, a bit unpleasant

So apparently there are dildos intentionally scattered all over this game, built in but also as random drops, because ... reasons? This game seems super weird without being the least bit weird.

Kinda mad that I'm never going to see the "What 2077 was supposed to look like / How 2077 turned out to be" memes in 57 years.

they will be unbearable if there's a dildo shortage that year

Hoo, maybe I should be glad that I won't be around.

"sweaty environments" is very dead on

Kinda mad that I'm never going to see the "What 2077 was supposed to look like / How 2077 turned out to be" memes in 57 years.

Someone in the game is 158 years old so if the medicine side of things is accurate maybe u will!

Its based on a 1988 tabletop roleplaying IP.

A year before James Hansen's congressional testimony on climate change. This future, as envisioned 30+ years ago, feels of nostalgia for that 80s. A dark future, to be sure, but still more optimistic about technological advance than might be speculated today. Three decades of tech incrementalism, Moore's law coming to an end, and looming environmental collapse, has displaced the concerns of 80s cyberpunk fiction. I think Paolo Bacigalupi will be regarded as way more spot on than William Gibson ever was.

One of the things I find most boneheaded in the game is that all of the vehicles are internal combustion. I'd like a mod that replaces the engine sounds with electric vehicle whines. And contra the Blade Runner franchise, the real future LA won't be a humid/sweaty place, indeed water will be increasingly scarce. I expect in 2077 corporations will still be evil, but as today they'll manipulate consumers/voters with implicit consent, indeed many/most will seek to live in an alternate reality, in which their personal troubles can be blamed on anti-corporatists. There may be widespread use of updated versions of Google Glass, but very few who aren't blind or deaf will choose implants. The "hard problem" in AI will remain hard: there will still be humans in the loop translating machine learning/data mining to consumer/voter manipulation.

I don't think CDPR was trying for predictive accuracy, although I'm sure they included some nods to current trends to keep that sense of vertigo. At this point, as many have noted, cyberpunk is just nostalgia for a past in which the future was going to be cool. Why would they include electric cars or anything else from the looming boring dystopia we actually face?

Does Keanu get a big kickback every time someone makes something cyberpunk? Cyberpunk/VR/all that shit is so boring and played out. They should have made it "Cyberpunk 20-amillion," and just treated it as a blank slate.

y'all ready for some nerd braggin? i still have my copy from high school ...

https://i.imgur.com/OC4mZvD.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/sgX3JZE.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/W5pcNEp.jpg

OMG, I'm such an idiot.

When y'all were saying it used to be a tabletop game...

https://i.imgur.com/j7M7mHh.jpg

... and I was thinking, How come I've never played this before?

I would probably play a video game based on the Fantasy Flight Android world.

playing cyberpunk2020 on a ms pac-man-style tabletop unit in a pizza parlor in 1990 would have been so sick though

yakuza 28 minigame

Pplains I made the same mistake

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/cyberpunk-2077-refunds/

Sony are issuing full refunds for everyone who bought it on Playstation. I was quite enjoying it on PS4 despite it being an unfinished mess, happy to get £50 back before xmas tbf. Wonder if they can force an uninstall from user accounts.

lol

I asked for my money back and received a short no-reply boilerplate saying they were fixing the game, but nothing else

Didn't expect this game to be an ET on the Atari 2600 level disaster, quite spectacular.

oh man it's vaporwaring. #aesthetic!

wowwwww what a fustercluck

The link to the refund page came up as a 404 on my first try. LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

this release is a meta cyberpunk ARG

It just gets worse:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/cd-projekt-could-face-investor-legal-action-over-cyberpunk-misrepresentation/

lol love to see it

current gen console QA: 200 zloty
tasteful marketing: 150 zloty
transphobic community managers: 50000 zloty
dick slider engineering team: 90000000 zloty

someone who is good etc

Definitely not pulling the trigger on this one any time soon from what I've seen, but I have to admit that I really do like the look of the details in the city environment.

lol, i got a push notice from the NYT telling me how badly this failed; not a good sign

took me 100 tries to beat first boss Royce. Got to hit those glitchy streets harder!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNqWPtcXk5w

can't actually tell the difference

Take my money!

Lol!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stlfQNzKdbc

The actual Cyberpunk one he made actually made me feel bad for the programmers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPW6fkcM-14

I’ve kinda gotten a kick out of corny gamer dorks seeing their lord and savior fuck up in spectacular fashion, but yeah, sympathies to the folks who had to grind this out for this result. Spectacular mismanagement.

Hoping we get some Fyre Fest exposes on wtf happened behind the scenes here.

Same here, except I wouldn't call them corny.

Have you not seem “Good Guy CDPR” memes that have flooded Reddit and such these past few years? Oof.

My adjective of choice would be noxious.

Also acceptable. It’s an array.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/style/cyberpunk-2077-video-game-disaster.html

On Glassdoor, a site where people can rate their previous employers, current and former CD Projekt Red workers said there was chaos behind the scenes: Office rumors spreading on Discord servers, misleading deadlines set by managers, infighting among the company’s top brass, and incompetence and poor planning leading to unnecessary “crunch,” a term for overworking employees to produce games under a tight deadline. Longtime engineering staff left the company as a result of overwork.

“The owners treat the company as a machine to earn money, and do not see employees as people but more like data in the table,” one former employee wrote on the site.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tJthUWc13Y

If you're not on a legacy console, this is running pretty well. Malcontents will push the glitch narrative, but that's not what I'm seeing on PC. I'm seeing a remarkably fluid game engine, great art, modeling and music, and serviceable but sometimes great writing. The voice actor for female V will be in demand, the male, not so much.

The more serious complaints should be with the issues that will be much harder to iron out: Railbound narratives. Lousy enemy AI. Scaling via bullet sponges. Domino effects in the underlying RPG maths such that some character builds just steamroll through without effort (or replayability). Pervasive environmental misogyny.

My guess, as it gets sorted, and more play on current consoles, this will viewed as technically (over)ambitious, but not captivating.

Iirc in the Dunkey video says he was playing on a generally solid PC rig, too, and still ran into tons of frame rate issues, really dramatic dips. As he says, if you can get Mario Odyssey running at 60fps on a Switch, and stuff like God of War and Red Dead running stable on a base console, then there is no excuse.

There isn't any excuse for the state of it on base model last gen consoles. They done em dirty.

Just recently found out that PlayStation straight up removed it from their online store a few days ago? Damn.

imagine if this came out in april as originally planned

I just started playing GTA V on my Base PS4, a game that came out in 2014, and yeah, there is no excuse at all